Battling Over Birth: Research Justice as Framework for Transforming Maternal Health Care

Wednesday, April 11, 2018

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There is a crisis in black women’s maternal health care. African American women in California are 3 to 4 times as likely as white women to die of childbirth related causes, our infants are twice as likely not to survive their first year. “Birthing while black” is a site of struggle, which for too many leads to disabling, trauma or even death. Using a research justice approach, Chinyere Oparah and members of the Oakland-based collective Black Women Birthing Justice spent five years documenting black women’s experiences of childbirth, with a focus on prenatal care, relationships with medical professionals, birth locations, labor and delivery, and the first six weeks. The result was Battling Over Birth, a human rights report that has been described by DONA International as “an accurate and chilling snapshot of the state of birthing as a Black person.”

In this webinar, Oparah explains the research justice framework and explores how it can be used to advance birth justice; she also shares findings and recommendations from the report and discusses how midwives can get involved in the movement to #liberateblackbirth.

Dr. Julia Chinyere Oparah PhD is an activist scholar, social justice educator and experienced community organizer, who is dedicated to producing groundbreaking critical scholarship in the service of progressive social movements. Dr. Oparah is an African diaspora specialist, whose interests span a number of different social concerns, including activism by women of color, violence against women, women and the prison-industrial complex, restorative justice, queer and transgender liberation, race and adoption, research justice and birth activism. Dr. Oparah is professor and department chair of Ethnic Studies at Mills College as well as Provost and Dean of the faculty. In addition to her graduate degrees in Sociology and Ethnic Studies, Oparah trained in community development. Prior to entering academia, she coordinated a black women’s center in the UK, and was executive director of a national development agency for non-profits serving communities of color.

Dr. Oparah is author of Other Kinds of Dreams: Black Women’s Organizations and the Politics of Organization, the only comprehensive history of the black women’s movement on Britain. She is editor of Global Lockdown: Race, Gender and the Prison-Industrial Complex, a seminal work that mapped the connections between globalization, gender and mass incarceration. She is also co-editor of 3 books: Activist Scholarship: Antiracism, Feminism and Social Change, Color of Violence: the Incite! Anthology and Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption. Oparah has Nigerian (Igbo) and British origins, and immigrated to the US in 1995. She lives in East Oakland with her partner and daughter.

Linda Jones, Doula and Black Women Birthing Justice Collective Member, will be presenting alont with Dr. Oparah. She is a mother of two who lives in Oakland, CA. She founded and owned Waddle and Swaddle Baby Boutique and Resource Center in Berkeley, CA and has been a part of the natural birth advocacy community in the Bay Area for over two decades. She belongs to Sistahs of the Good Birth, a group of Black Doulas who work with low income mothers. She was one of the founders of a volunteer Doula group that provided services for low income, uninsured and teen moms that birthed at Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley.